Sign-in                Register             

Newsletter No 2: March 2022

To Members and Friends of the Fractal Economy Cooperative,

Welcome to the second newsletter coming to you from Gumbaynggirr land.

The good news is that the voting system is on the cusp of being available for you to use. It is very easy to use and will enable you to allocate funds to not-for-profits of your choice.

There are currently only two not-for-profits registered – Bellingen Community Radio 2BBB and Chrysalis Steiner School.

So, if you are a current or past member and have a favorite not-for-profit or worthy organisation that can use some money for the work they do in our community, now is the time to encourage them to sign up and start spreading the word to their membership. When a NFP is signed up with the FEC, members and supporters of that NFP will then need to sign up as an individual member to have a vote.

Remember: when members record a sale to other FEC members, they contribute 3% of the money received to the FEC, which then goes into the gift funding budget.

You will be able to vote 100 % to your favorite NFP or divide your vote between any number of registered NFPs listed in the NFP directory.

This is the essence of the Fractal Economy and how it can make your money work towards a fairer economy by keeping money in our communities and giving members the right to say where it is spent.

A call for financial assistance

As you can probably tell, there has been a lot of software writing involved in getting the FEC website and community contribution app to where it is today. There is still more that has to be done in the immediate future. We have only managed to progress this far on account of a generous donation by an active member but this source of funding has been stretched to its limits. We need other members to contribute towards this financial burden so that we can make it to the next significant milestone (of voting on our gift funding allocation). If you can contribute financially in any way, the directors would be extremely grateful.

 

If you have newsletter articles of interest or would like to be part of the

management of the members newsletter please send your expression of interest to

contact@easyrealsee.com

Till the next time,

The FEC team

PS If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter reply to this email.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn

Most Popular Posts:

Transaction Tax

In the national economy, a transaction tax would be a flat rate tax on every monetary transaction with only a few minor exceptions such as transfers within a family unit. No costs or expense s by businesses will be tax deductible. Purchases of things like shares and currencies will also incur this tax (which pretty much wipes out the speculative transfers of capitalism). In the FEC economy we apply this tax to transfers between members so that we as a collective can do very good and powerful things with it. For marketing reasons, we have renamed this tax to ‘community contribution’.

Commons

We at the FEC do not think that the government is the appropriate collective institution to manage things like banking, taxation and land rental. These can all be taken out of the hands of government. Government should be restricted to policy making in the political realm. What we call the commons is an economic collective. This economic collective does not have the argy bargy of the political life. Outside of the capitalist context, it is the principle of cooperation and mutual aid that pervades the economic life, and it will have a very different structure to government. Because the term ‘public’ is often associated with government, we prefer the term ‘commons’ in reference to this economic collective.

Community Contribution

‘Community contribution’ is in fact the same as a transaction tax as described elsewhere [see Article 2 in ‘Further reading’]. The reason we have renamed the tax is for marketing reasons as people recoil from the notion of paying an extra tax. Tax payments is in fact how we as individuals contribute to the community in order to fund things like public transport, welfare and a functional judicial system. So people should be proud in saying that they pay their taxes. The reason that we have an aversion to the word tax is brought about by corporations who have the ability to make their expenses cost deductible. They load up all costs of dubious things into their income-expenditure calculations that they can get away with not paying a lot of the taxes that are their due. The whole scam trickles down to the rest of the economy and tax avoidance/evasion becomes an acceptable sport. In a true transaction tax, no expenses are tax deductible.

What is a fractal?

A fractal is by one definition ‘An object whose parts, at infinitely many levels of magnification, appear geometrically similar to the whole’. Take the fern leaf as shown in this image:

The first image above is a graphic picture of a whole fern leaf. If we take one of the ‘branches’ of the leaf – as depicted in the boxed section – and examine its structure, we find that the ‘branch replicates in full the pattern of the original fern leaf. The boxed section of the first image, rotated and appropriately magnified as in image 2, show an identical pattern to the whole leaf. If we take yet another ‘sub-branch’ out of the fern in image 2 as depicted in the boxed section of Image 2, we find the same leaf pattern replicated again. And so on.

The Fractal Economy Cooperative takes its name from this feature of fractals – that the part replicates the whole. We believe that what needs to be done in the global economy is the same as what needs to be done in the national economies; and that it is what we intend to do in the fractal economy. This means that we policies in a number of places that should also be practised in the national economy in order to make it a socially just and environmentally sustainable economy: direct democracy in the realm of policy making, direct individual participation in the allocation of public/commons spending; all the practices that make up for what we call commons banking, a new taxation system (which we call ‘community contribution’ for marketing reasons); support for cooperatives over share ownership of companies; a return to common ownership of land effected through the banking system.